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We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed
self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and
how operating.
The sense-principle in it we may at once decide, takes cognisance
only of the external; even in any awareness of events within the
body it occupies, this is still the perception of something
external to a principle dealing with those bodily conditions not
as within but as beneath itself.
The reasoning-principle in the Soul acts upon the representations
standing before it as the result of sense-perception; these it
judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the
impressions, so to speak, rising from the Intellectual-Principle,
and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will
develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and late-coming
impressions [those of sense] and adapts them, so to speak, to
those it holds from long before- the act which may be described
as the soul's Reminiscence.
So far as this, the efficacy of the Intellectual-Principle in the
Soul certainly reaches; but is there also introversion and
self-cognition or is that power to be reserved strictly for the
Divine Mind?
If we accord self-knowing to this phase of the soul we make it an
Intellectual-Principle and will have to show what distinguishes
it from its prior; if we refuse it self-knowing, all our thought
brings us step by step to some principle which has this power,
and we must discover what such self-knowing consists in. If,
again, we do allow self-knowledge in the lower we must examine
the question of degree; for if there is no difference of degree,
then the reasoning principle in soul is the
Intellectual-Principle unalloyed.
We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the soul has
equally the power of turning inwards upon itself or whether it
has no more than that of comprehending the impressions, superior
and inferior, which it receives.
The first stage is to discover what this comprehension is.
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